CANNOT DEFINE FIELD MORE THAN ONCE Troublshooting

[Guest]

I got this error message when trying to export from access to a dbf file so I
could look at it in ArcView. I don't have repeated field names, I don't
think. Do names like FILLER_1, FILLER_2 show up as the same field
definition? I can't get it to work...what do I do??? Please help me!

 

[Brendan Reynolds]

I'm going from memory here, but I believe dBase has a smaller maximum file
name length than Access, and that the export function will truncate your
Access field names to that length if they're longer. So if you have two
Access field names that have the same first nth characters, they end up as
duplicate names when they're exported.

You could try aliasing the field names in a query, using shorter aliases,
and exporting the query instead of the table.

 

[Brendan Reynolds]

I'm going from memory here, but I believe dBase has a smaller maximum file
name length than Access,

Oops! That was supposed to read 'field name', not 'file name'.